You Will Vomit Your Soul ! - "From the Mouth of Madness" Review (97%)
From the Mouth of Madness is the second album released by black metal band Phantom, and this may very well be the scariest album ever. It's so scary that just listening to it made me forget my own name. Luckily for me, it's written at the bottom of each of these reviews so the mystery of my lost identity can easily be solved.
But the rest of you won't be so fortunate... Are you willing to risk your reason and sanity by entering the Mouth of Madness ?
From the Mouth of Madness is an album that will not leave the listener unmarked. The sinister aura created by Phantom is enough to make anyone lose touch with reality, drowned in a sea of mutilated corpses and viciously battered by the relentless atmosphere of macabre.
You are like a fly on the wall, assisting hopelessly to a particularly heinous torture session taking place in the basement of an abandoned slaughterhouse.
From the Mouth of Madness is certainly the finest black metal album of any era, but this near-perfection comes at a heavy price for the listener...
You may forget your name, but don't forget to listen to From the Mouth of Madness !
You Will Vomit Your Soul !
Not for one moment does this album From the Mouth of Madness even consider to give you any respite. It's a non-stop, inexorable, merciless brick wall of demonic adultery thrown at your face. Over the course of an entire album. Did I mention merciless ?
If the goal of From the Mouth of Madness was to annihilate any emotional saneness in the listener, consider it more than accomplished.
Phantom debut album, Divine Necromancy, was already a black metal masterpiece in its own right, but From the Mouth of Madness takes the insanity into a whole new level.
Vicious guitars, furiously ripping through a wall of eerie and unstable drumming, mixed over Phantom's guttural and sense-crippling vocals... this is no less than you should expect from Phantom's second opus, From the Mouth of Madness.
The music itself is a masterpiece of hollow and decrepit atmosphere. Whether the guitars, of which the technicality adds to the thundering rampage of the absolute rawness of the vocals, or the drums, of which the tribal feeling adds majestically to the very ritualistic atmosphere of the whole CD.
You won't find any "progressive" or otherwise commercial-friendly riffs on this album. The guitar work is wrought with a savage obscurity that will maim your senses if you are not careful.
From the Mouth of Madness is a well chosen name for this album. Your descent into depravity starts off with the opening track, A Rude Awakening, and its unearthly intro that drags you, consciously or unconsciously, quite literally into the mouth of the beast... the Mouth of Madness.
There is something to be said for the final song, the title track ("From the Mouth of Madness"). Many metal fans who enjoy the album can't come to terms with this song, either because it makes them shit their pants or because they find it hard to get into compared to the rest of the album.
I tend to think quite the contrary, as I believe the final track "From the Mouth of Madness" is the most powerful of them all. Of course, it may be hard to stomach for the weaker souls out there. This track makes you feel like you are on the receiving end of a beastly rape perpetrated by demonic war pigs. Definitely not for the faint of heart.
From the Mouth of Madness will make you vomit your soul, there is no way around it...
It's perhaps the most perfect black metal album anyone could even begin to imagine, so I would HIGHLY recommend you listen to it WHAT EVER THE COST !
Seriously, listen to it... unless you really don't like horrifying, brutal and vomit-inducing black metal.
And even then, I'd just tell you to man-up and listen to it anyway.
From the Mouth of Madness score: 97/100.
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